Last weekend I attended SunshinePHP (it was a blast; you should go next year if you didn’t this year…or if you did, for that matter). Friday night, there was a panel on minimum PHP versions, with an eye to raising the bar to something in recent, non-end-of-life history rather than allowing versions that won’t get security fixes anymore. The battle cry there was one of pushing hosts, devs, sysadmins and communities in general to newer versions (5.5, 5.6, and 7 late this year) in the name of better speed, better security, and a much happier environment for developers.

This battle cry was mixed with the explanations of some panel members on why their packages still support PHP 5.2 and 5.3 (remember, both now no longer get security fixes), with remonstrances that increasing a version requirement on CMS-centric frameworks like CodeIgniter, or CMSes themselves like WordPress and PyroCMS would end up stranding user bases on unsupported, vulnerable software if they increased their minimum version requirement to something reasonable, rather than getting those devs and end users on a supported, more dev-friendly version of the runtime. For full-stack frameworks, and given the proliferation of, and ease of migration to, 5.4+ hosts, I find this unconscionable, for reasons stated eloquently by Anthony Ferrara.

But another member of the panel also supports PHP 5.3 with his libraries: Paul M. Jones with the AuraPHP project. Why am I not railing against this…and the fact that the Aura v2 libraries actually downgraded their version requirements relative to Aura v1? Paul mentioned that the effort to allow 5.3 compatibility was quite low (remove short array syntax, remove callable typehints), but there’s a better reason: Aura libs can be used to modernize applications and serve as a bridge to current versions…and you want to put the other end of the bridge where those apps are sitting right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: auraphp, codeigniter, php, wordpress